Dick’s announced that they will no longer sell AR-15s, and all I’m seeing is cheers and huzzahs for the company.
My first thought was, “Why was a sporting goods company selling assault rifles in the first place?” There’s something just plain wrong with that.
But now I learn that they’ve pulled this stunt before. In the wake of the Sandy Hook murders, they announced then that they would stop selling these specific murder-tools (cheers, huzzahs), and then a year later they quietly resumed peddling instruments of death (silence, cluelessness). This is a stunt. A ploy. An advertising gimmick. And oh, but they are receiving lots of free advertising right now.
Fuck ’em.
Not “a year later”. Less than a year later. Eight months.
Well, they’re not really selling “assault rifles”, which allow the operator to select between semi-auto and automatic firing. Since automatic weapons are heavily regulated and essentially illegal, Dicks doesn’t sell them.
What they sell are single-fire rifles that are modeled on assault rifles. Cloudy terminology used by the media on this topic is only making it more difficult for people to land on the same page, and it’s impeding the 2A folks’ ability to take anyone seriously. I also understand some of these folks will never take anyone seriously.
Nobody should have AR-15s.
#2,
I don’t care what arcane and irrelevant differences exist between different subspecies of gun. They should all be banned. No exceptions. There is nothing to be gained from stirring over the minutiae of obscure hoplophile terminology – get rid of the lot, like the civilised world already has.
Supposedly this is a permanent policy change, as is their decision to stop selling extended round magazines and limiting all gun sales to 21+. They’ve also apparently reaffirmed their decision not to carry bump-stocks or other gizmos that increase fire rate.
If true, it’s actually almost a halfway decent moral stand, but without anyone else in the industry taking a similar stance, it won’t actually do a spit of difference in the real-life availability of these mass-killing machines. Walmart, Cabela’s, gun shows and online retailers will just pick up the slack. It looks like it’s caused a minor dip in gunmaker stocks, but that won’t last.
@4
The vast majority of developed nations allow limited gun ownership, so the civilized world can’t really be said to have “[gotten] rid of the lot”
#6,
It seems to me that permitting people to own dangerous instruments of death is the very definition of uncivilised. Ergo, by definition, the civilised world does ban such things.
There’s no excuse for it. None. Get rid of the fucking lot.
Here’s a thought…you can own an AR-15 or Ak-47, BUT you must leave it in a locked safe at the gun range, and sign it out when you want to play with it. It never leaves the range, and when you’re done playing, it goes back into the vault.
Gun owners get their toys, and it’s still safe. Plus nobody needs this kind of gun to defend yourself…for THAT you can have a 6 shooter. THIS is for attacking first, and the range is the only place for that.
One of the children from that Florida school thought (mistakenly, I believe) that the shooting “sounded like an AK-47”. Personally, I don’t know what an AK-47 sounds like, but then I’m in the UK. If there are other countries where children can recognise the sounds of particular firearms, I should imagine most of those countries will be at war.
@7
Okay, kind of undercuts your assertion that there exists some meaningful “civilized world” that has “already gotten rid of the lot”, when even highly restrictive nations like Japan lets hunters own guns.
#10
The civilised world very much exists. Perhaps not in the legal codes of many nation states, but it does. Vast swathes of it are without deadly weapons as we speak. And certainly as an aspiration. One day, maybe, the whole world will be civilised, when the last gun is melted down and turned into something useful.
@11
Cool, so your initial statement just maths out to “There are people who don’t own guns”, which is true and also common knowledge.
Why you think that has any argumentative weight is beyond me. Sneering at, for example, poor subsistence hunters or farmers that need guns to fend off wildlife for being “uncivilized” for having the hunting rifle that keeps their family fed is probably not going to change their minds.
#2
Sure, yes, ‘assault rifle’ as far as the law is concerned is a term of art with a very particular definition… but it is also a common use word, and in that context is is simply understood to be a rifle-type firearm with a fast rate of fire and a large ammunition capacity. There’s no need to get pedantic over definitions.
#11
Farmers in particular come to mind as people with a legitimate reason to own firearms, along with professional hunters – not the dudes that enjoy bragging about killing defenseless animals, but the ones that cull invasive species.
My thought:
You do not need the Second Amendment to create a Right To Keep And Bear Arms of whatever sort you want. All you need is to enact a plain old law.
A SIMPLE SECOND AMENDMENT SOLUTION:
Make everyone who owns or holds a gun automatically a member of the organized militia, which will be well-regulated by the state and federal governments. Well-regulated means not only trained, but also enlisted (documented) and subject to rules, including rules for storage and handling of guns outside of militia exercises. The rules can also have severe penalties for violations (such as evasion of enlistment/registration), including court martial. The rules can also declare some unfit for militia duty and thus unable to own or hold a gun. The US government has a clear Constitutional power to do this.
I’d love to hear some good criticisms.
Ok, we’re only a dozen messages in, and already the narrative has shifted from ASSAULT RIFLES to “farmers and hunters”. When did we start having hunting rifles shooting up schools? When did a farmer take his shotgun to shoot kids?
Stop changing the subject…we’re talking about assault rifles in schools, not hunters and farmers FFS. Just because the narrative is unpleasant doesn’t mean you get to ignore it by talking about something else while trying to make a pro-gun point.
Besides, if you are hunting with an assault rifle, then you’re taking out vicious game like humans, not just looking for food. Does ANYONE go out hunting animals with an assault rifle for food? No, they are designed to hunt humans. That’s why we’re talking about THOSE guns, and ignoring the hunters and farmers. Sheesh, this is pretty basic.
So why the need to own an assault rifle in the house again?
@15
The shift happened when cartomancer asserted that the distinction is irrelevant and that all guns should be banned, which as mentioned would have a pretty adverse affect on hunters and farmers who need them to stay afloat. Don’t try to shift the blame for a topic shift onto the people responding to a post that inherently shifted the topic.
There is no need to own an assault rifle, and I doubt anyone here thinks so. The disagreement is over whether or not a complete ban on guns is a good thing, as opposed to heavy restrictions a la “every non-US developed country”
To be fair, if you read the linked article, Dick’s didn’t say they would not sell guns anymore. They said:
“Out of respect for the victims and their families, during this time of national mourning we have removed all guns from sale and from display in our store nearest to Newtown and suspended the sale of modern sporting rifles in all of our stores chainwide.”
This statement does not imply it was a permanent move by the company, in fact it is obvious it is only intended to be temporary.
@8
Good thought. In keeping with the actual spirit of the Second Amendment, you can’t own an assault rifle, but you can carry one on weekends in your service with your state’s Army National Guard Reserve, which is codified (see Dick Act) as the state militias, referenced in the amendment. Then, when some of these gun-wielding NRA civilian yahoos start an insurrection against the guv’mint, you can shoot them.
Somehow, both hunting and farming appear to have been possible before guns were invented. That’s not to say that I agree with cartomancer that a total ban would be better than an almost-complete ban – guns may be more humane than the alternatives for eliminating invasive species or protecting crops – but we ought to be able to consider the possibility without false claims that guns are necessary for any purpose. And even where subsistence hunting is traditionally important, the introduction of guns has often led to the commercialization of what was a subsistence activity, and overkill on a huge scale.
I note that we only got to #2 before the “not using exactly the right terminology” distraction appeared.
it’s also worth noting that on a global scale, the real “Weapons of Mass Destruction” have been small arms. Since 1945 they have killed hundreds of times more people than the “ABC” trio, and many more even than aerial bombing with high explosives.
@19
Agreed in both regards, my primary contention is that cartomancer’s approach is ineffective as a mind-changing tactic, not that I disagree that guns are bad.
I think that, ideally, we wouldn’t have a need for subsistence hunting or livestock protection, but as it is, people involved in subsistence hunting and farming rely very heavily on firearms. Telling them “Can’t you see that thing that puts food on your table is a murder death machine, you uncivilized hick!?” is not going to get them to see your side of the argument.
Michael @17: Before concluding what’s “obvious” you could read a bit more.
@7 “It seems to me that permitting people to own dangerous instruments of death is the very definition of uncivilised.”
I look forward to hearing your cogent and precise definition of “dangerous instruments of death”. I’m sure it will include cars and airplanes since those have been used to kill large amounts of people on multiple occasions.
@20 “I note that we only got to #2 before the “not using exactly the right terminology” distraction appeared.”
Distraction? More like a suggestion that we use appropriate terminology to maintain clarity in our discussion. For example: a scientific discussion where people continually misuse “theory”. Scientists will have difficulty taking your point seriously if you can’t use the correct terminology. Agreements will never be made if people don’t agree on definitions of terms.
Sounds like marketing. Next time I’m in the area with a Dicks’ I’m going to go check.
My own functional definition of an assault rifle is this: is it something I’d want in combat? Shotgun? Nope. AR-15? Yep. I also like this description of the AR-15 by sci-fi writer Joe Haldeman from his novel 1968:
My own functional definition of an assault rifle is this: is it something I’d want in combat? Shotgun? Nope. AR-15? Yep. I also like this description of the AR-15 by sci-fi writer Joe Haldeman from his novel 1968:
Here’s your school shooting for the week. A teacher in Dalton, Georgia pulled out a pistol and started shooting n his classroom. Fortunately the only injury reported was an injured ankle, and the teacher has been taken into custody.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/georgia-teacher-custody-reports-gunfire-high-school/
Great. So, now we need to arm the students so they can defend themselves against the teachers with guns.
It only makes sense, right? The more people who have guns, they fewer people get shot. It’s just basic logic.
However, there is typically one teacher and N students in a class (where N varies enormously, from a very small number to hundreds). This means the teacher is outgunned N-to-1. Therefore, the teacher needs to be able to accurately shoot at least N people before any of them can shoot back. An armoured vehicle of some kind equipped with multiple robot-controlled high-speed Gattling-style cannons might work, but probably the old reliable “quick return to orbit and nuke the whole planet” approach is the direction in which to proceed — just make sure none of the students return with the teacher to orbit…
We have a Dick’s here in Pasadena. It used to be Chick’s (I know, perhaps a sexual reflection of the times). I miss Chick’s, since Dick’s is ridiculously expensive, so I shop at Big 5 for my sports-related stuff. Dick’s never did sell assault rifles in the store here, as California is notoriously anti-gun, but I hear President Trump is scheduled to visit California soon, so maybe he’ll change all that (the Delta Airlines thing, you know). Yes, one can never feel safe without a 100-round, semi-automatic, bump-stock AR-15 handy. Oh, and by the way, fuck Amerika.
beer @2,
Quibbling aside, it’s not only the rate of fire (and, hey, “bump stocks”), but the deadliness.
cf. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/
also
https://www.app.com/story/opinion/readers/2018/02/23/gun-laws-ar-15-regulate-ammunition/365728002/
As someone once colorfully said in response to me saying the same thing here in Pharangula – I would like to know if my regulation of murder machines is working properly. That requires some knowledge of the murder machines. If some politician proposes a partial ban of the murder machines, I would like to know if the partial ban would be effective, or whether it’s just a token gesture without any real impact. Repudiating the knowledge that is necessary to make this determination, and attacking those who wish to bring that knowledge to others, in order to craft more effective regulations and bans of murder machines, should be welcomed. You have it exactly ass-backwards.
Furthermore, when PZ Myers misuses technical terms in the OP after so much time, he looks willfully obtuse and willfully ignorant to our political enemies. And in a certain sense, he is being willfully ignorant on this topic – he’s admitted as much in past blog posts IIRC. That makes our job even harder. It makes liberals look like fools. I thought that we were supposed to be the group of accuracy and truthfulness, and the group that disdains willful ignorance and factual inaccuracy. It’s not hard to be correct in your usage of words describing guns if you don’t want to know anything about guns. Just say “guns”. If someone want to talk about subcategory of guns, then the ethical onus is on that someone to be sufficiently informed to at least be factually correct.
~sigh~
This matters to me because I want more gun control, but I’m also convinced that this sort of misunderstanding on the left and this attitude of willful ignorance is counterproductive for that goal. We’re wasting time and political capital supporting politicians as they pass meaningless laws and claiming victory. Assault weapon bans are at top of the list of do-nothing token-gesture regulation. We should hold our politicians accountable, and call them out on their shenanigan do-nothing gun control laws.
That means we should call out anyone who proposes an assault rifle ban or an assault weapon ban as ill-formed. This means that we should call out anyone who claims that a ban on high capacity magazines will cause a significant change in gun deaths, or even a significant change in gun deaths from mass shootings. These facts are facts, but they do not correspond with the typical liberal’s Hollywood understand of guns. What needs to change is the typical liberal’s understanding of guns, so that they can craft more effective regulation.
In other words, PZ Myers made a factually incorrect point; assault rifles, aka machine guns, are already banned by the United States (more or less). The United States does not a machine gun problem. As far as I can tell, even the number of mass shootings with machine guns is vanishingly small. PZ Myers should be corrected on this point. He doesn’t have to use a technical term incorrectly. He could just say “gun” when he means “gun”. He could say “rifle” when he means “rifle”. He could say “scary looking rifle” when he means “scary looking rifle”.
Furthermore, PZ Myers’ intended point that we should have an assault weapons ban is just ill-formed and counterproductive. There is no such thing as “assault weapon”. It’s a fictitious entity. It’s a term used to sell to people who don’t know about guns, or it’s a marketing term devoid of value. Any semiauto rifle of the same caliber is about as dangerous as any other semiauto rifle of the same caliber. For example, Senator Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban simultaneously explicitly allows ownership by make and model and explicitly forbids ownership by make and model of the exact same gun, the Mini-14. The version with the scary paint job is banned, and the version with the “wood hunting rifle” paint job is allowed. That the sad state that our gun control conversation is at. PZ Myers should be corrected on his intention to use a nonsense meaningless marketing-buzzword.
At least high capacity magazines are a real category of things in the real world. However, I believe based on the evidence that banning them won’t do that much good. It might do some good, but not that much. For example, Columbine was 10 round magazines only. Virgina Tech was only handguns, with mostly 10 round magazines, and a few 15 round magazines. It frustrates me to no end whenever I read news pieces that say that Virginia Tech shooting used high capacity magazines – beneath a thin veneer of shin veneer of technical correctness, it’s downright dishonest. Similarly, whenever I read news pieces that make the argument “banning high capacity magazines will make a difference, because the shooter can be tackled during reloading”, it makes me mad. Again, this is a Hollywood understanding, and not a real world understanding. Almost no mass shooter is ever stopped by being tackled during reloading. Even the famous Tucson shooting of Rep Giffords was not stopped during a reload – the shooter was tackled because his gun broke and he started to run away (the spring in the magazine broke). Most news pieces on this topic will incorrectly report this fact, and that also frustrates me immensely.
Regarding rifles in general: If you look at the data available from Mother Jones, looking only at the mass shootings where the have data on the type of gun, about half of mass shootings used only handguns, and those mass shootings account for about half of the total number of deaths too. Handguns are also more easily concealable, which is why they’re the weapon of choice. IIRC, 75% of gun deaths are handguns, and 50% of mass shooting gun deaths are handguns. Any sort of partial gun ban that doesn’t also ban handguns is not going to do much.
We should be focusing on effective legislation, such as: A complete ban of semiauto guns (and revolvers). A training and licensing regime, such as we do for a driver’s license. We could even make the training course much harder than a driver’s ed course. We could also pass strict liability laws for the safe storage of loaded and unloaded guns, with vigorous enforcement, which could go a long way to preventing accidental gun deaths too. Waiting periods for purchase. Universal background checks. Etc. We could also end the drug war and legalize all recreational drugs. That would stop a lot of gun deaths too. We could also work to remove other sources of lead from our environment. The policy of banning leaded gasoline was the single most effective policy of the last 50 years at reducing violent crime – it was the most effective policy at reducing violent crime by quite a wide margin. Reducing wealth inequality and fixing our racist “justice” system would help too. Also, we should tackle the problem of police shooting others without good cause, which happens at an alarming rate for everyone, but much moreso for people of color.
PS:
For full disclosure, I think I’m still in favor of gun rights, but weakly, and regardless, I’m very much in favor of more gun control, such as the many examples that I cited above.
PPS:
To mikehuben
This is about what I want. I agree with you on every point minus one – which is a legal point. Under the constitution before amendments, you are basically correct. (The founders would disagree with you, but they would rely on constitutional jurisprudence arguments that have fallen out of favor.) However, then came the second amendment. After the second amendment, the one thing that the congress cannot do is forbid private ownership and possession of guns. However, I think there’s still an extremely wide amount of room to maneuver. I think it’s a baby-step from certain historical practices (such as the second federal militia act of 1792) to a theoretical modern practice where in order to legally own a gun, you must have a gun owner’s license, and one must pass basic military training with yearly refresher courses in order to obtain and keep a gun owner’s license. Violations can and should result in suspensions or revocations of the gun owner’s license. I think there’s even a lot of room to maneuver concerning open or concealed carry in city limits (I admit I’m not quite sure on this one). However, we would need to repeal the second amendment in order to ban private personal possession, in city limits and elsewhere.
PPPS:
For further reading if anyone cares about the history of the second amendment, I strongly suggest my google doc, which has a metric shitton of citations.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ak6bx8jyDxIlsLuFHHevw-4RQ7R5vJb15RtTNG5d79w/edit
Now evidently Walmart is doing the same.
I have a question: Is it legal for businesses to set age limits like this without a law behind them?* I’ve seen interviews with gun store owners talking about how they’re choosy about who they’ll sell to. This seems to open the door to discrimination and abuse. “We won’t sell X item” makes sense (most of the time), but “We sell X item but not to people in this group” is odd. Can a store or chain of stores refuse to sell alcohol to anyone under 25, or over 70? What’s the law that lets them do this? (I assume there must be one or more people would be protesting.)
*(I favor a law behind them, ftr.)
EnlightenmentLiberal:
It’s not it’s history that’s problematic, it’s its purported utility and merit.
Let’s get real — they’re primarily weapons, not sporting tools. As the 2nd explicitly acknowledges. But the justification is otiose.
Widespread presence of deadly weapons which require little to no skill to use, which cause demonstrable harm in their society, are excused as an insurance policy against invasion.
(Do you realise how silly it seems to citizens of every other advanced economy on the planet?)
To John
Having gun rights may be very silly. Having the second amendment and not repealing it may be very silly. I’m close to undecided nowadays. However, I will argue for enforcing the second amendment as long as it is law, in order to protect my other civil liberties. That puts me in a difficult position because many people don’t appreciate the distinction here. I’m glad you do. Thanks.
Thank you too, EL.
FWIW, within the paradigm, your prescription seems to me meritorious, practicable and achievable subject to sufficient political will/pressure.
Interestingly, gun sales and gun-maker stocks haven’t bounced the usual way after this most recent event — rather, the contrary.
—
Even Trump got to hear someone address him at his linguistic level:
To be clear, I put forward a complete ban on semiauto guns (and revolvers) as a reasonable goal for the anti-gun person. As I already said, I think I’m weakly against that particular policy proscription at the moment, but I feel like I’m weakening every day. However, I’m totally for the remainder of the options that I put forward.
[oops]
Source: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/28/17064540/donald-trump-gun-control-full-transcript-roundtable
Outlaw semi-auto and outlaw magazines of more than 3 rounds for long guns.
Offer a buyback, or straight-up confiscate the existing ones if they refuse to turn them in. They can still have a gun, but bolt action or single action revolvers only. Which is still far in advance of the muzzleloaders that existed in 1789, the time all these Constitutional Originalists admire and think we ought to return to.
EL, :)
(Yeah, I got that)
[pedant]
Proscription is a forbiddance, prescription is a requirement.
Lol, woops, thanks.
:) Attitude is a big part of it, and culture has a lot of inertia.
EL:
Why don’t you decide? Isn’t it important enough to at least come up with a reasonable tentative conclusion, instead of non-positions like these? Why the hell are you hectoring us about terminology and what our (not your) strategy ought to be like, when you can’t even do that?
This doesn’t say you’ll do anything to make this possibly “silly” thing go away, which is actually the important thing you should be doing. Indeed, you might try very hard to to keep the silliness around and enforce it to the max, because you’re paranoid about possibly losing other non-silly things that actually have no necessary relationship with the silliness in question. If you won’t decide or won’t say what your decision is, then there’s no way to tell how much silliness we may have to hear from you about it.
I blame the branch of the Republican party and white rural area where all government regulation is bad (except when it’s suppressing minorities and other people besides white cis-straight Protestant males). The founders had plenty of quote unquote “common sense” regulations of guns. I suspect some of my policies would go farther than many of them would feel comfortable, but so too would driver’s licenses IMO, and times change, and the constitution has been written to accommodate this kind of change. Nowhere does it say that rights cannot be reasonably licensed and regulated for the common good. What really frustrates me about the NRA et al is that we have great historical precedent in the second federal militia act of 1792 that the federal government can make you show up for militia training, and everyone was expected to show up. Again, given the change in regulation in general (i.e. driver’s licenses), this should be an open-and-shut case today that it’s totally constitutional to require gun owner’s licenses and mandatory training classes similar to actual military basic training to get the licenses. Of course, the licenses must not be denied arbitrarily, and they must be granted according to a standard written with the premise that 90%+ of the population should be able to qualify if they exert themselves, but that still leaves an amazing amount of room to work with, and permits really stringent training classes and licensing rules.
To consciousness razor
When I get some spare time and the mood strikes me, I do research into the topic. There are still a couple of facts that I would like to know before I decide. Some of the facts should be obtainable in practice, but some would be very hard to obtain. For example, I’d like to know the relationship between gun ownership levels and certain kinds of violent crime, e.g. a possible deterrence effect. I don’t think I’ve seen reliable numbers on that, and I’m concerned that both sides are cooking the numbers on this.
Right now, I don’t think I’d fight against a movement to repeal the federal second amendment. Right now, that should be good enough for you. Not everyone has to fight for every just cause. If you want more from me, that would be imposing a moral duty on me to do more research, lengthy research, and I don’t think that’s a fair thing to do in conversation, and I don’t think that in this instance, it’s part of the minimal duty that we all have as good people to do stuff to make sure evil doesn’t flourish.
Besides, I think I’m doing more than my fair share by trying to argue for the gun control that I gave above, and equally attacking inane NRA nonsense when I see it (which isn’t that often for the circles that I travel in).
Meh.
PS:
No matter what my position is, I think that the police should be subject to the same gun control laws as everyone else. I don’t want to live in a country of martial law, of a standing army, where there is a superior class of citizens with superior powers of arrest, detention, search, seizure, and other use of force. This is a principled position for me.
I don’t want to make a special exception only for “shooter response police teams” so they can carry whenever they want. Any exception for “shooter response police teams”, i.e. the training and licensing, should be available to every citizen. However, if the scheme involves keeping the guns in a central location under government police control, under lock and key, and they’re only released with official orders, I think I could be ok with that. Haven’t thought too much about this corner case.
I realize that what I say here is quite unusual and extraordinary, and it probably seems silly to you, but it’s important to me, because I think society would be better off with it.
How far is this from the 2nd and militias? And how close to reality in the USA?
What Critics Don’t Understand About Gun Culture
I carry a weapon—and it’s tied me closer to my community.
I often see people using this “police are minutes away” argument for gun ownership. Where I am, the police are probably half an hour away, maybe an hour depending on what else is happening.
Firstly, I hate to think how many police you’d need for them to be fraction of a minute away, or whatever proximity is necessary to not need a gun for self-defence. Ugh.
Secondly, even if the police are an hour away it doesn’t make me more likely to want a gun. This is the UK and I can be confident that the chances of the hypothetical assailant having a gun are vanishingly small to zero. Under these circumstances the risk to me, and those around me, actually rises if I have access to a gun.
And the notion that it would “tie me closer to my community”… well, maybe it would increase my social circle to include more farmers. So I suppose that’d be good. At the same time, they’d all regard me as the weirdo with the murder weapon fetish instead of owning a plain old shotgun.
@EnlightementLiberal #45:
Hey, you just described what I believe most first world countries outside of the US do for their police forces. I know some of them have officers who carry guns, but not many in this day and age.
SC:
Could be, it certainly seems to happen in my country. For example sex toys or marginally alcoholic beverages may not be sold to minors for image reasons, despite it being legal.
SC, lumipuna,
Restaurants have kids’ menus for kids under a certain age (usually 12); lots of museums/cinemas/entertainment venues have different rates depending on age; supermarkets have senior discounts. As far as I know none of that is mandated by law.
Not sure if that’s exactly parallel, though.
methuseus@48 I get the impression that the number of police forces that don’t have their street officers armed are far outnumbered by those that do.
Indeed. From the top-of-my-head, I can think of only two(-ish): Ireland, and the UK(excluding N.Ireland). Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge adds Norway, Iceland, and New Zealand to that very small list. The Washington Post adds another “Twelve of 16 Pacific island nations […] do not allow police officers to carry weapons” (5 countries where most police officers do not carry firearms — and it works well, July-2016), putting the total at around twenty. In broad terms, there are about 200 countries in the world, suggesting roughly 10% do not have routinely-armed police.
This is not saying that most countries need routinely-armed police, only that few have routinely-unarmed police. I myself have lived in two of the routinely-unarmed countries, and admit to very much preferring that.